Poole isn’t sure why the Retina iPad mini comes with a slower A7 chip, but he speculates that it could be due to iPad mini’s smaller battery.

The Geekbench 3 benchmarks also reveal that the Retina iPad mini is more than 5 times faster than the original iPad, which doesn’t come as a surprise as it was powered by the A5 chip which made its debuts in 2011 with the launch of the iPad 2.

Interestingly, Poole also reports that the benchmarks also reveal that the Retina iPad mini is slower than the iPad Air by 7%, which confirms that the slower clock speed does have an impact on the Retina iPad mini’s performance.

However, the new iPad mini is 7% slower than the Air in both single-core and multi-core tests. While the difference is significant, I don’t think it’s significant enough to warrant purchasing an Air instead of a mini for performance alone. Also, since I expect developers to still support the iPad 2 and the iPad mini for some time I don’t expect much software will take advantage of the A7 processor to the point where that 7% difference will matter.

I would agree, based on my initial impression, it is impossible to figure out the difference in performance between the iPad Air and Retina iPad mini, so the reason for buy one of the new iPads are still, pricing and size of the screen.

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